The Crisis System

Fables Of Austerity

There's jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today...

Like lemmings, the obedient workers of today are expected to crush
themselves on the myths of crisis, budget deficits, inflation,
global competitiveness or high technology. Mysterious explanations
of our falling wages appear and disappear like villains on day-time
soaps. Stern bank presidents give unquestionable reasons why we
must give one more pound of flesh for financial stability. CNN
suddenly tells us the remote-control computerized world-market
is the final arbitrator of our wage and work conditions. The 1994
US recovery was worse than the 1993 recession. The unemployment
rate may have dropped a big 1% but unemployment benefits and youth
summer jobs got cut more. The hours of those who had jobs have
gone up to torture levels.

The usual rhetoric is that no one understands a 100 billion dollar
deficit, a 3 trillion dollar economy or 1-trillion-dollar-a-week
currency speculation. Of course the workings of the economy aren't
simple. But we can still use abstraction and approximation to
understand the system.

The Federal Reserve sells us inflation, unemployment, and the
deficit as forces independent from how we live. But no matter
how elaborate the computerized money system becomes, the economy
will always boil down to the way people relate to each other.
A single person now cannot challenge the economy. The initial
barriers are the cops and the merchants. But the larger barrier
is that no one person has a community, a collective response,
to fall back on. The LA riots ended when people had looted most
of the stuff that was in the area. They didn't form a community
to either create a new way of living or to fend off the National
Guard.

Wage labor seems simple. You sell your activity for something
of value. But it hides how people's power to create, their productive
activity, then winds up confronting them as something external,
outside their control. Cars, Nintendo games, houses and TV programs
seem to come from the magical economy rather than coming from
our activity. The single separation of wage labor gives birth
to the whole vast host of apparently autonomous economic forces.

We use the loose term crisis system to describe the methods of
using its up and downs against us that the economy has developed
since about 1970. To show how the crisis system rests on our alienation,
we will look the two faces of wage labor - production and consumption.

Consumption

...(the commodity) is a definite social relation between
men, (sic) that in their eyes assumes the fantastic form of a
relation between things. Marx, Capital, V.1, pg. 72. (rearranged
to improve phrasing)

The American form of the crisis system bares the marks of the
affluent society that produced it. Even when 60% of workers live
two pay-checks from homelessness, the image of massive wealth
still dominates their lives.

The classical affluent society lasted from 1950 to about 1973.
This model was promoted as a way to deal with excess labor militancy
and factory capacity after WWII. It admitted that society produced
enough to give everyone a bigger piece of the pie. But the pieces
of the pie were only given in terms of participation in an artificial
patriarchal community.

Workers sold their lives, their productive activity, to buy back
enriched survival. Enriched survival (the "Package deal")
is survival on both the physical and the social level. A conformist
society expected a white, male, "middle-class" worker
to have a well-paid factory or office job in the suburbs. He was
expected to own a car and a house, support a wife and children
and save enough money to send his kids to college. All his money
would thus be spent keeping-up a pre-package life in the TV-defined
pseudo-community. If the ideal "middle class" worker
didn't have a wife and a house, he could be fired. Blacks, poor
whites and women were excluded from this model. But enough people
were affected that the newly created television networks could
show a universal image of America having a happy "Leave It
To Beaver" life-style.

Production

Myth: "My father worked hard so his children could get a
better life. I think it's time our children had more of the same
spirit." White House Chief Of Staff Leon Paneta, on working
for a chance to work harder..

Myth: wages are equal to how productive a worker is.

What myth hides: wages tend to go down to the cost of reproducing
a person on the level of social survival.

When workers are fighting defensively in this society, the fight
comes down to negotiating the basic level of social survival -
the social contract. The implicit question people collectively
answer each is "how much can we take?"

Government, businesses and unions created the affluent society
by engineering a high cost and highly policed system of social
survival. "Corporate America" embraced the affluent
society for twenty five years. It gave them a willing, well-controlled
work-force. Since they had a monopoly over the world economy,
the U.S. capitalists preferred this conformity. With the struggles
of the previous fifty years were in their minds, they chose "happy"
workers living on suburban housing tracts over poor, angry slum
workers.

Working class resistance and the force of the world markets eventually
made corporations give up the affluent society package deal. Inspire
by Vietnam, drugs and social disintegration, children of both
workers and professionals had refused the social policing of the
package deal. During the sixties and seventies, many people "dropped
out." They used the affluent society's massive social slack
for hedonistic, counter-cultural living. Welfare and alternative
work were often scammed.

Even relatively well-paid workers refused the discipline of the
factory and went on wild-cat strike against company and the union.
Also many smaller industrial corporations had broken unions and
directly pushed down the price of survival. In both these trends,
there was unfortunately not a collective response defending the
interests of all of the exploited together.

The end of U.S. domination of the world economy was official when
the Brenton-Woods treaty broke-down. The value of the US dollar
could no longer be fixed artificially high. It came down and then
high-priced energy imports pushed down wages. And average wages
have kept going down ever since.

Consumption Terror

The consumption system kept expanding after the sixties. The marketers
of today sell not only gadgets but entire fields of existence.
The medical technology field demands people pay for being alive.
The insurance, courts and police together demand that people pay
for the damage done by every kind of consumption. The justice
system forces workers to pay massive insurance to drive to jobs
that have moved to the suburbs. Software companies produce copyrights
and patents on whole categories of information.

The marketing system of today covers a ridiculous, bloated area
of life. Thus fewer and fewer can afford to buy simulations. The
number of people covered by the corporate "package deal"
is less and less each year. The workers who are covered toil ever
more desperately to keep the same "life-style" on massively
decreased wages. In the US, the average work-week is approaching
60 hours. Many former-housewives work to make the income needed
for a "middle-class" life-style.

The number of "plastic surgery" operations done in the
US has doubled every five years since 1969. Clerks in large department
stores must spend a large percentage of their wages simply on
clothes for their jobs. The standards of appearance and attitude
are daily raised to the point where fewer and fewer people can
satisfy them. Appearance as an endless staircase of prestige was
systematically begun with fashion magazine femininity (glamour)
sold to middle-class housewives. It is now being intensified and
generalized to all men and women.

Rackets

Fewer people being able to pay is not by itself a problem for
the giant corporations. It only changes the way business works.
The crisis system supplements the affluent society with a greater
accumulation of confusion, competition and rackets. The new rhetoric:
To preserve the pie, fewer people will get a slice.

All the producers of simulations also become owners of rackets.
They extract surplus value directly out of those who will not
pay for their package deals. Record publishers quietly collect
royalties from the blank tape makers. The law assumes that a certain
percentage of people who use blank tapes will make illegal copies
of records. Coca-cola and Pepsi promote a whole life style and
are moving to control this life style more and more beginning
with legal trade-mark litigation to protect their image. Multi-media
companies which own images, ideas or ways of doing things far
out-do any mafia street protection scam.

The expansion of the police, copyright controls, gangs and "Intellectual
property" are the after-life of extended survival. They gives
corporation profits beyond the corporations ability to contribute
to the social survival of those in the package deal. (See ASAN
#4, pg. 26, The Information System).

The most "advanced" systems of capitalism have been
the most desirable to export to the former colonial nations. Thus
arms and intellectual property - the tools of rackets - are the
most widely exported commodities world-wide.

The rotten "middle class" of government and corporate
functionaries in South America, Africa, or the former Soviet Bloc
look to Levi's Jeans and take up American corporate culture. These
classes created by rackets - war economies and nationalist looting.

Automation

The Myth: we are now in a post industrial society where robots
have taken "the good jobs."

The new rhetoric of this society is that capitalists have automated
everything to the point where workers are no longer needed. It
continues the "end of the working class" with a different
rhetoric. The TV once said everyone who worked was middle class.
The TV now says everyone who works is gone, useless.

In terms of bare technology many companies could have started
firing half their workers ten or twenty years ago. Even an un-automated
factory can supply the needs of a vastly disproportionate number
of people. The American "Great Depression" saw unemployment
hovering around twenty percent for years. Thus a part of the population
wound up supporting the entire economy. Today, six million people
work two jobs.

Robots, for example, have not had quite the labor-saving impact
the propaganda claims. Toyota Motors recently opened-up a special
less-automated factory in Japan to produce less-expensive cars.
For the market, a human has an advantage over a robot. Humans
are general purpose. They can be produced with commonly available
materials. They reproduce themselves without being told to do
so. They can be supported with modest supplies or even no supplies
at all for a while.

The advantages of robots can often be illusionary. The power machine
and the computer have already eliminated the top and the bottom
of labor leaving a wide middle. While robots can produce much
more of a single item, they still require supervision. They must
be programmed for each given task. They are expensive to produce.
They must be maintained periodically. They are only applicable
to a single production method.

Production Terror

"The de-industrialization of America" is not a matter
of production technology. It is a matter of capital imposing social
reorganization on us. The affluent society has broken-down in
American more completely than in Europe or other industrialized
countries. When more American workers bought the suburban package-deal,
more real solidarity was worked out of the culture. In Europe
or Australia, old forms of working class solidarity survived a
little more the build-up of the consumer society. So these societies
now have been less successful smashing social solidarity.

The period of "post-industrialism" is simply capital
reaping the false consciousness it had sowed in the affluent society.
Once the affluent society broke down, capitalists no longer had
to put automation in terms of giving people more "free time."
They could rework the production process as much as they wanted.

The importance of robots and computers is often to allow a new
type of production. Since the mid-eighties, auto companies have
produced engines with micro-fine tolerance of parts. This makes
them both more efficient and makes it impossible to maintain them
with normal tools. Thus the large manufacturers have managed to
capture the home-grown car maintenance market. This hasn't lowered
the production cost of a car - indeed prices have risen and have
no been entirely artificially held up. It has thus simply re-distributed
the production process over a wide area.

"Labor-saving" improvements are more important for changing
the way workers confront their jobs than for total labor savings.
If a General Motors can break the production of a factory into
many parts, each of which happens in a different part of the world,
GM can give the impression that no single worker is necessary.
They can eliminate the effect of a strike of the whole factory
or of any crucial element. They can force workers to expend the
maximum creative energy doing "all the jobs" instead
of each worker having fixed duties. This reorganization is a political
accomplishment. The rhetoric of "the death of the working
class" helps this happen. The capitalist may not have changed
either the technology or the production process.

The constant re-organization of production is part of the permanent
market-based churning of all life. The production process is fragmented
and transferred over a larger and larger area. Large companies
no longer dream of fully automating everything. Instead, each
corporation creates an ideal versions of a person's relations
to production - their "corporate culture." The power
machine and the computer eliminate the top and the bottom of work.
The perfect simulation is the perfect relation of worker to production
but this has no one single perfection.

The permanent chaos of production is driven by the electronically
organized world market. The operation of the market is so utterly
short-term that it forces managers to over-turn the conditions
that guaranteed their profits and power before. "If it's
not broken, break it" urges one management guru. The churning
of the world market gives capital a free hand in exploiting it's
natural enemy, us, the working class. The extension of the market
has divided the working class as much as it has united the ruling
class. Every ostensibly oppositional organization serves as a
means of increasing this division. Unions only exist to teach
workers to only struggle in certain areas in certain ways. Nationalists
today all say they want "their people" to win in global
competition.

Thus capital makes constant war on the working class. There is
no effort to create a truce, even to make things easier on the
ruling class. Employer constantly try to destroy the working class
as a category. They try to destroying any hint of solidarity,
They lower wages to bare survival or lower. They create a vast
police state. They give the impression that all activity is acquiesced
on by the masses, etc..

The myth of work itself no longer mattering is a part of this
war. Wage labor, in it's most horrible incarnation in decades,
is still at the heart of capitalism. It simply no longer has the
garments of respectability that unionism or Budweiser commercials
once gave it.

Shit Work

From the numerical logic of production, the ideal worker is the
dispossessed worker of the third world country, the bottom worker.
From accounting's logic, there is no need for them to have more
than "bare bones" existence.

The ideal worker from the logic of consumption and management
is the top worker. She or he extends the domain of the simulation.
She or he produces programs, does research or otherwise uses the
full power of existing machinery. The ideal higher level worker
is skilled and flexible. But since they are good consumers, they
won't band together with other workers to make demands about working
conditions or types of work done etc.. This ideal worker lives
in conditions of perfect atomized consumption. European countries
attempt to adapt their workers to this role by having their unions
create cowed simulations of rebellion thereby removing any real
threat of rebellion. This model has been harder to sell to workers
or on the world market.

The "shit worker," the worker at the bottom resolves,
the points where the simulation has failed. The bottom worker
uses out-dated machinery to construct junk when the robots fail.

The ideal bottom worker makes pennies a day. A strong patriarchal
state is best at guaranteeing their hard work. This state crushes
all rebellion but keeps the worker in adequate health and spreads
the ideology that work is a privilege.

The bottom worker survives mostly on the official margins, on
stolen time or in shadowy areas not recognized by the world market.
In the third world, most labor is also outside of the world market's
accounting. It appears as support, a corollary of the world market
that is not measurable in the dollars of this market but which
the system still needs.

In Nigeria, Mexico and Peru, the largest population group is a
vast army of "unemployed" scavengers. These are former
peasants driven off the land and into the cities. They survive
through combing trash and cooperating in shanty towns on the outskirts
of huge and growing cities.

China has been the fastest growing economy in the world for the
last five years. Here the former Stalinist state indirectly subsidizes
export production. They sell land, electricity and labor at artificially
low prices supported by the still surviving Stalinist central
planning system. These prices can only be sustained by a state
which simply takes much of the produce of the Chinese peasant.

Planners naturally try to merge the top workers and the bottom
workers while perfecting each model's special properties. Cycles
of recovery and recession allow hedonism and puritanism to alternately
dominate ideologically.

The first world/third world division of labor under capitalism
is being broken up. It is reappearing in the ideological division
of the population in each area into apparently different "races"
or social classes - who are all proletarians.

To preserve its rackets, the marketing system extends hierarchical
consumption. In the classical "industrial revolution,"
low-paid workers could consume the food, clothing and shelter
needed for bare survival. Workers knew they were dispossessed
since they had nothing. Under hierarchical consumption, survival
is never guaranteed. If you consume more, you are just more likely
to survive. The better the neighborhood, the less likely a "psycho"
is to kill you. The better the clothes, the more likely you will
have friends. The better the health plan, the less likely you
are to die in a ditch. The better the insurance, the less likely
a disaster is to destroy your life savings. So if one accepts
the terror as given, every level of consumption can masquerade
as a level of privilege. So you can feel even if you are more
miserable than a medieval surf.

Hierarchical consumption is a world strategy of development. Consumer
society is still, is even more, devoted to creating artificial
needs now that these needs can be met by fewer and fewer people.
The terror of increasing needs calls on workers and managers to
donate extra labor to capital in the vague of gaining favor. Everywhere,
the multi-national corporations use more of this surplus, unpaid
labor.

"You pout, you're out" - David Hasselhoff, star and
co-producer of the low budget sit-com Baywatch demands total "effervescent
enthusiasm" from anyone who works in the production company.
(Sf Chronicle, dec 2,1991)

In advanced nations, much of the activity of creating ideologies
comes through this unpaid, "entrepreneurial" labor.
New "life-styles" come from subcultures on the edge
of consumer society. From Raiders jackets to acting classes to
tattoos, isolated consumers labor to add the meaning missing in
the vacuum of modern life. They then sell these ways of living
to merchandisers at a discount.

The full crisis system tries to merges consumption and production
in the racket worker. The racket worker is a low-level entrepreneur.
The racket worker perfects hierarchical consumption. They must
constantly fend for their survival with little or no knowledge
of what will follow. The independent designer who does the work
typesetters used to do, the trainer, the taxi driver, and most
exactly the cop all fit this ideal. They must guard their piece
of little capital. They move ambiguously between shit worker and
privileged worker - knowing only vaguely how far they are in either
direction.

Resistance

The development of the means of production, the resistance levels
of key workers and the resistance of the entire society decide
how much the crisis system can exploit us.

The weapon that has been lacking is a view of the entire process.
This view would give an extra enzyme to any attack by explicitly
questioning the system.

Still today, not quite as many people see cars, fancy clothes,
and houses in the suburbs as privileges. Ads more often show them
now as desperate escapes from even more desperate situations.
When you buy natural food, you pay extra for food they promise
not to put poison in. When yuppies buy gap cotton clothes, they
pay for "the soft, natural feeling that escapes a plastic
impersonal society." When you pay for insurance on a car,
you pay for the cost of the accidents and death from an irrational
transportation system.

The working class has both rejected the "values" that
are promoted by the ruling class, resisted particular incidents
of increased exploitation and risen-up in "irrational"
attacks on the entire system.

GM worker went on a short strike start September 24, 1994 against
the forced over-time in the "Buick City" plant. This
strike shut down most of GM's US production, which had been going
at maximum capacity.

The question of exactly how far this misery can go will be answered
in term of misery, spirit, and physical survival.